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More "Digger" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dinners. The policemen had urgent duties elsewhere. Only the Bible reader remained to see the grave partly filled in, and to try to persuade Bobby to go away with him. But the little dog resisted with such piteous struggles that the man put him down again. The grave digger leaned on his spade for a bit ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... sheet of paper is enough for love, but a foolscap extra can alone contain a railroad and my ecstasies. There was once a man, who was born at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, who was a common coal-digger; this man had an immense constructiveness, which displayed itself in pulling his watch to pieces and putting it together again; in making a pair of shoes when he happened to be some days without occupation; finally—here there is a great gap in my story—it brought him in the capacity of ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... expressed much surprize at the number of skulls thrown upon the stage. To which Jones answered, "That it was one of the most famous burial-places about town." "No wonder then," cries Partridge, "that the place is haunted. But I never saw in my life a worse grave-digger. I had a sexton, when I was clerk, that should have dug three graves while he is digging one. The fellow handles a spade as if it was the first time he had ever had one in his hand. Ay, ay, you may sing. You had rather sing than work, I believe."—Upon Hamlet's ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... 16th of July, 1883, I was digging, with my son Emile, in the sandy heap where, a few days earlier, I had been observing the labours and the surgery of the Mantis-killing Tachytes. My purpose was to collect a few cocoons of this Digger-wasp. The cocoons were turning up in abundance under my pocket-trowel, when Emile presented me with an unknown object. Absorbed in my task of collection, I slipped the find into my box without examining it further than with a rapid glance. We left the spot. Half-way home, the ardour of my search ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... been a piece of play-acting. The apprentice, who knew his master's weakness for the pretty bar-maid at The Lucky Digger was, as he expressed himself, "taking a rise out of the boss," and Tresco's simulated wrath was the crisis for which he had schemed. Between the two there existed a queer comradeship, which had been growing for more than two years, so that the bald, rotund, red-faced goldsmith had ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... little while, the women, singing—men, and drummers, suddenly gave a loud shout, or rather yell, clapped their hands three times, and then rushed into the surrounding cottages, leaving the old grave—digger ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... wonder at?"—with a hoarse, unnatural laugh. "That's Nature. You cannot make fat pastures out of sea-sand, any more than a thorough-blood gentilhomme out of a clam-digger. The shark's teeth will show, do what you will." He pulled at his whiskers nervously, went to the window, motioning Doctor Bowdler roughly aside. "Let me see ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... is the effect of the discussion between Menenius and the sentinels in V. ii.; and in the very middle of the supreme scene between the hero, Volumnia and Virgilia, little Marcius makes us burst out laughing (V. iii.) A little before the catastrophe in Hamlet comes the grave-digger passage, a passage ever welcome, but of a length which could hardly be defended on purely dramatic grounds; and still later, occupying some hundred and twenty lines of the very last scene, we have the chatter of Osric with Hamlet's mockery of it. But the acme of audacity is reached in Antony and ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... to be watched during the early stages of garden-preparation. Nothing is so satisfying as to lean ruminatingly against a fence and observe the slow, rhythmic swing of the digger's back or hear the repeated scraping of the shovel-edge against some buried rock. It sometimes is a help to the digger to sing a chanty, just to give him the beat. And then sometimes it is not. He will tell you in case ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... our coast cities without provocation; but as Chimmie Fadden would say, "Dat cuts no ice." They are but a few thousand in number, and in the whole caboodle there's not a chappie who would fight should a Digger Indian fill his ear with a bushel of buffalo chips, squirt tobacco juice on his twousahs and throw alkali dust in his optics. Lawd Chelmsford has suffered himself to be deceived by the bloodless ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... of the North American continent (concerning whose civilisation more will be said in the account of their divine myths) occupy every stage of culture, from the truly bestial condition in which some of the Digger Indians at present exist, living on insects and unacquainted even with the use of the bow, to the civilisation which the ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... especially as the grave-digger was laid up in his bed, from long working in a damp soil and sitting down to take his dinner on cold tombstones, and I was consequently under obligation to go alone, for it was too late to hope to get any other companion. However, ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... coffin is enveloped with fine white sheeting, and cords are tied around the sheeting to keep the cotton in place. When the coffin is lowered into the grave the cords are removed, and the cotton is given to the grave-digger. Possibly this custom may have been derived from some older one, or may have originated from contact with the whites. The mode of burial in coffins and the use of cotton sheeting are certainly modern customs, but may be modifications of some ...
— Contribution to Passamaquoddy Folk-Lore • J. Walter Fewkes
... Digger, n. a gold-miner. The earliest mines were alluvial. Of course the word is used elsewhere, but in Australia it has ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... here, in due time, was set up some extraordinary scenery of my own painting. The curtain, I recollect, though it worked smoothly enough on other occasions, invariably hitched during the performances; and it often required the united energies of the Prince of Denmark, the King, and the Grave-digger, with an occasional band from "the fair Ophelia" (Pepper Whitcomb in a low-necked dress), to hoist ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... daughter of a grave-digger, whence the nick-name. Born in 1807. Frail, nervous, independent, retiring at first, she tried hiring out, but then fell into vagrant habits. Reared in a village on the outskirts of Grenoble, where Dr. Benassis came to live during the Restoration, she became an object of special attention on the ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... a higher hill in front and the heavy woods which served as a screen for the artillery. I noticed many holes where the French shells had burst, and the valley to the north looked as if some one had been experimenting with a well digger. One 21-centimeter shell had cut a swath about 100 yards long out of the woods on the hill where we dismounted. The trees were twisted from their stumps as if a small cyclone had passed, and one could realize the damage the shells could do merely by ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... sceptical. He and another rustic functionary, of whom we shall speak presently, the grave-digger, are always the esprits forts of the place. They are so much in the habit of talking of ghosts, and are so well acquainted with all the tricks of which these evil spirits are capable, that they scarcely fear them at ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various
... Theobalds, (p. 235.) who thinks, that it is necessary to suppose a considerable Number of Years spent in this Tragedy; because Prince Hamlet is said to desire to return to Wittenberg again, and is supposed to be just come from it; and that afterwards, the Grave-Digger lets us know that the Prince is Thirty Years old; my Reasons are, that as Wittenberg was an University, and Hamlet is represented as a Prince of great Accomplishments, it is no wonder that he should like to spend his Time there, in going on in his Improvements, rather than ...
— Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare (1736) • Anonymous
... their claims, as soon as the surface-water began to accumulate in their little open pits or shallow levels, beyond the control of a single bucket, or other such primitive contrivance for bailing. Even the more active and industrious digger soon found his own difficulties to accumulate just in proportion to his own superior measure of activity; since, as soon as he carried his own excavation a foot or two deeper than his neighbor's, he found that it only gave him ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... of the town the grave-diggers met him: they shone their torch on his face, and, recognising Zarathustra, they sorely derided him. "Zarathustra is carrying away the dead dog: a fine thing that Zarathustra hath turned a grave-digger! For our hands are too cleanly for that roast. Will Zarathustra steal the bite from the devil? Well then, good luck to the repast! If only the devil is not a better thief than Zarathustra!—he will steal them both, he will eat them both!" And they laughed among themselves, ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... to the camp of a certain professor, who was engaged in excavating the ruins of an ancient Egyptian city, a young and faultlessly-attired Englishman, whose thirst for dramatic adventure had led him to offer his services as an unpaid assistant digger. This immaculate personage had read in novels and tales many an account of the wonders which the spade of the excavator could reveal, and he firmly believed that it was only necessary to set a "nigger" to dig a little hole in the ground to open the way to the treasuries of the Pharaohs. ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... If, however, there is no man in the family to render this last service, the neighbours gladly offer their help. It would be a grievous thing in Toroczko to have one's grave dug by a hired grave-digger. ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... paroxysm of grief, throws himself upon the bed and holds the stage till he smells the red fire for the vision; then he staggers down stage, strikes an attitude; the others do likewise; picture of 'Little Eva,' curtain. Talk about doubling 'Marcellus,' 'Polonius,' 'Osric,' and the 'First Grave Digger'! Why, that's nothing to these 'Uncle Tom' productions. But hold on, where did I get side-tracked? Oh, ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... the case it is on your part, not mine," retorted the mechanic, with more feeling. "I am not a digger of gold out of the earth, nor a coiner of money. I must be paid for my work before I can pay the bills I owe. It was not enough that I told you of the failure of my customers ...
— All's for the Best • T. S. Arthur
... bosom, There is food for all in the land's great store; Enough is provided if rightly divided; Let each man take what he needs—no more. Shame on the miser with unused riches, Who robs the toiler to swell his hoard, Who beats down the wage of the digger of ditches, And steals the bread from the ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Pforta, the commandant, made preparations for his defence, and laid the suburb towards Halle in ashes. But the ill condition of the fortifications made resistance vain, and on the second day the gates were opened. Tilly had fixed his head quarters in the house of a grave-digger, the only one still standing in the suburb of Halle: here he signed the capitulation, and here, too, he arranged his attack on the King of Sweden. Tilly grew pale at the representation of the death's head and cross bones, with which the proprietor had decorated his house; and, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... was the denial of the sanctity and efficacy of infant baptism: hence their inclusion under the general term Anabaptists, even though many of them passionately disclaimed any connection with this hated, proscribed and persecuted sect. As Gerrard Winstanley, the inspirer of the Digger Movement, seems to us to have been greatly influenced by the teaching of one of these sects, the Familists, or Family of Love, it may be well to give here a brief outline of its ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... the abundance of matter that the circumstances of the infant Colony were favourable to ballad-making. The curious upheavals of Australian life had set the Oxford graduate carrying his swag and cadging for food at the prosperous homestead of one who could scarcely write his name; the digger, peeping out of his hole—like a rabbit out of his burrow—at the license hunters, had, perhaps, in another clime charmed cultivated audiences by his singing and improvisation; the bush was full of ne’er-do-wells—singers ...
— The Old Bush Songs • A. B. Paterson
... die himself of grief. Die of grief!" continued he, after a pause, completely buried in his sad and bitter thoughts—"it is not so easy to die of grief. The sad heart is tenacious of life, and sorrow is but a slow grave-digger. I have heard that one could die of joy, and it seemed to me just now, when Elise rewarded me with a kiss, that I could understand this. If she only loved me, it were a blessing of God to ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... the labouring-man. Of these were the landpoor peer, with his sense of responsibility cultivated by daily life and duty in his county, on the one hand; the professional man of all professions, the little merchant, the sailor, the clerk and artisan, the digger and delver, on the other; and, in between, those people in the shires who had not yet come to be material and gross, who had old-fashioned ideas of the duty of the citizen and the Christian. In the day of darkness these ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... gravely examining it, "but I kin mend it as good as new. I reckon you allow I can't sew," she continued, "but I do heaps of mendin', as the digger squaw and Chinamen we have here do only the coarser work. I'll send it back to you, and ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... the town) is on the sides and summit of a round hill, which is planted with cypress and other trees, among which the white marble gravestones show pleasantly. The grave was dug on the steep slope of a hill; and the grave-digger was waiting there, and two or three other shirt-sleeved yeomen, leaning against ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... venerable monument of antiquity, considered merely with a view to history,) will furnish us with frequent instances of violent contentions concerning wells; the exclusive property of which appears to have been established in the first digger or occupant, even in places where the ground and herbage remained yet in common. Thus, we find Abraham, who was but a sojourner, asserting his right to a well in the country of Abimelech, and exacting an oath for his security "because he had digged that well." And Isaac, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... simple. You were perfectly right to wail like one of your own Banshees because the likes of me—once content when the pale shadow of Pegasus passed her by—is become an ink-spattered, carbon-grimed gold digger! Ten months ago, shivering and quivering over "ONE CROWDED HOUR," I cowered back in my semi-occasional taxicab and watched the meter with a creeping scalp.... Now I can ride from Yonkers to the Square and ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... said Old Mother Nature. "You can climb a little, but as a real climber you are not much of a success. You are better as a digger." ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... thy people. Longing, but patient, I will await thee in Hades. Thou wilt often come to the spot in which they will bury me, to throw a plume from thy helmet, a ring from thy coat of mail upon the grassy mound. And the old grave-digger will say: 'He was here to-night; she is still remembered by ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... The digger paused and raised her head, listening, as though she had caught the faint, whispered note of human voices. She was a black haired girl of nineteen or twenty, dressed in a motley of flowered calico and silk, with strings of gold and silver coins ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... have a plan!" suddenly cried the bush. "You are a very good digger, so why can't you dig a tunnel right under me? Start it inside here and curve it up so that it comes outside of my prickly branches, and then ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Travels • Howard R. Garis
... The "Digger" movement was a shorter and much more obscure protest on behalf of the people than Lilburne's agitation for democracy; but it is notable for ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... lightly about among the rocks, scraping off mussels with her hoe; and the Modoc, the champion clam-digger of all, spreading her tentacles here and there, and never failing to come up with a bivalve. It was a picturesque scene, viewed from the great rock; and when the tide began to sweep in again, George Olver sent a piercing whistle along shore, to call ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... supposed that they were the local police, who had been stirred up by Scotland Yard, and had traced me as far as this one-horse siding. Sitting well back in the shadow I watched them carefully. One of them had a book, and took down notes. The old potato-digger seemed to have turned peevish, but the child who had collected my ticket was talking volubly. All the party looked out across the moor where the white road departed. I hoped they were going to take up ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... "Do you see that big fellow there? His name is McKean. He comes from my part of Ireland. He is a lawyer; the last time I saw him he was in a court defending a prisoner, and now the whole six feet seven of him is nothing but a dirty digger." ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... barometer, a large knife and digger for plants, note-book, telescope, compass, and other instruments; whilst two or three Lepcha lads who accompanied me as satellites, carried a botanising box, thermometers, sextant and artificial horizon, measuring-tape, azimuth compass and stand, geological hammer, bottles and boxes for ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... west the Canon Country loomed behind its sharp-faced cliffs, on the east the rolling ranges, dotted with oak and digger-pine, went gradually up to the feet of the stupendous peaks ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... sudden (it seems I had made it too large) a great quantity of earth fell down from the top and one side: so much, that, in short, it frightened me, and not without reason too; for if I had been under it, I should never have wanted a grave-digger. Upon this disaster, I had a great deal of work to do over again, for I had the loose earth to carry out; and, which was of more importance, I had the ceiling to prop up, so that I might be sure no more ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe
... man's hair "a decent cut." We found that according to the penitentiary code, the decent way of wearing the hair was to cut it all off—if the same rule had been adopted with regard to clothing, the Digger Indians would have been superfluously clad in comparison with (what would have been), our disheveled condition. Some young men lost beards and moustaches on this occasion, which they had assiduously cultivated with scanty returns, ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... his garrulous complaints the grave-digger was at work in a new grave on the sagebrush flat a mile or more from town when the undertaker and the liveryman drove up at midnight with all that remained of Billy Duncan jolting in the box of ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... a big house with hundreds of others. They are like bees in their cleverness, knowing how to tunnel in wood, dig deep pits in the ground, or make nests of mud. Mr. Kellogg, a very wise man, and young to be so wise, tells of one interesting little wasp, called the thread-waisted sand-digger, which lives in California in the salt-marshes. These marshes are covered by plants, but in between are little smooth places covered with a glistening crust of salt. It is in these open spots that Mrs. Sand-Digger makes ...
— Little Busybodies - The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies • Jeanette Augustus Marks and Julia Moody
... "tipple," where the coal that came out of the mine was weighed and recorded. Every digger, as he came from the cage, made for this spot. There was a bulletin-board, and on it his number, and the record of the weights of the cars he had sent out that day. And every man, no matter how ignorant, had learned enough English to read ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... hear the gravel rattling out of the grave digger's shovel with a thud upon the coffin lid; or, you can hear the crunching, jarring sound as the casket is slid into its place in the receiving vault, and you can hear the turn of the key and the snap of the bolt as the gate or door of the sepulchre ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... Bettisfield and Fenns Bank. This, it was supposed, might even be drained by making the railway across its quivering surface, but hopes of this sort were not to be realised, for it remains to-day a wild, but picturesque stretch of heather and silver birches, where the peat-digger plies his trade with, perhaps, as much profit as the farmer would in tilling it. But as to its power to bear the weight of passing trains the engineers had little doubt. The canal already crossed it, and though in making soundings the surveyors ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... from a tomb in St. Pancras churchyard, Middlesex. It is a flat stone, which some years since lay even with the ground, but was, about 1815, raised on a few tier of bricks, (to prevent obliteration by footsteps,) by order of the church-wardens, as I was informed by the grave-digger, and which, no doubt, was done on account of the singularity of the lines. The situation of the tomb is not far from the east corner of the church, a little beyond a lofty tomb with a monument. The inscription, from time, has been much defaced, and the verse is not easily made out by ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 367 - 25 Apr 1829 • Various
... malignant, but otherwise equally below his intellect, no less than his scholarship; we mean the inscription on his grave-stone. This, as a sort of siste viator appeal to future sextons, is worthy of the grave-digger or the parish-clerk, who was probably its author. Or it may have been an antique formula, like the vulgar record of ownership ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... instance, in a tunnel near me, but in which I was not interested, the log slipped down after the digger had got out beyond it. He immediately began digging for the surface, for life, and was fortunately able to break through before he suffocated. He got his head above the ground, and then fainted. The guard outside saw him, pulled him out ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... on to where the grave digger was pursuing his occupation. He answered my morning salutation civilly enough, but continued intent upon his work. He was a man of about fifty years of age, spare, but strong, with gray hair, and sunken cheeks, and certain lines about the mouth which augured a ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... horror at the savage slaughter at Magdeburg, the triumphant Tilly marched upon and captured the city of Leipsic. Here he fixed his headquarters in the house of a grave-digger, where he grew pale at seeing the death's-head and cross-bones with which the owner had decorated his walls. These significant emblems may have had something to do with the unusual mildness with which he treated ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... stiffness of his expression was not a thing which Conscience could read like print; if the simple-minded clam-digger had not quite unintentionally ripped away the mask which he had, until now, ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... digger, by the beard of him, and his red jersey," whispered Jan, as he bent tenderly over the poor fellow, and put his head on one side to listen to his breathing. "Beautiful he sleeps, to be sure!" said Jan: "and a tidy-looking chap, too. 'Tis a pity to wake 'un, poor ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... traditional form of sheet composting practiced by row-cropping gardeners usually in mild climates where the soil does not freeze in winter. Some people use a post hole digger to make a neat six-to eight-inch diameter hole about eighteen inches deep between well-spaced growing rows of plants. When the hole has been filled to within two or three inches of the surface, it is topped off ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... or the infection might be clinging to their hands and might so be transferred from them to their food with fatal effects. In Great Fiji not every one might dig a chief's grave. The office was hereditary in a certain clan. After the funeral the grave-digger was shut up in a house and painted black from head to foot. When he had to make a short excursion, he covered himself with a large mantle of painted native cloth and was supposed to be invisible. His food was brought to the house after dark by ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... Palermo. Five other fragments of the text have now been published, of which one undoubtedly belongs to the same monument as the Palermo fragment, while the others may represent parts of one or more duplicate copies of that famous text. One of the four Cairo fragments(1) was found by a digger for sebakh at Mitrahineh (Memphis); the other three, which were purchased from a dealer, are said to have come from Minieh, while the fifth fragment, at University College, is also said to have come from Upper Egypt,(2) though it was purchased by ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... their teeth, stared from the railings northwards. And then, like a star at first, the Point Lonsdale light twinkled out of the darkness, and a low murmur ran round the decks—a murmur without words, since it came from men whose only fashion of meeting any emotion is with a joke; and even for a "digger" there is no joke ready on the lips, but only a catch at the heart, at the first glimpse ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... before the body of my father was found. A stormy nor-wester had thrown it high up on shore at the foot of the dunes not far from the mouth of the Rhine, and a clam-digger came to claim the promised reward. My mother went there with me and prayed a long time by the side of the body. I did too, in my own way; that is to say, with a constant reservation, as one might write ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... absolute own: It's the place where a digger can bury a bone. Then he tests his pin-teeth on a pansy or rose, Spreading ruin and petals wherever he goes; And his mistress declares, when he's nibbled for hours, That nothing is sweeter Than Peter the eater, The ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... at her unexpected good luck in meeting with this returned digger, whom she had known very well at Bendigo under another name, and where he passed himself off as the husband of another woman. She perceived that now he had found his wife in Adelaide, doing very well in business, he would rather ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... down the scale. Your Edison pries fearlessly into the intimate secrets of matter; your Marconi employs the mysterious properties of the "jellied ether," but let a man seek to experiment with the laws of that singular electricity which connects you and me (though you be a millionaire and I a ditch-digger), and we think him a wild visionary, an academic person. I think sometimes that the science of humanity to-day is in about the state of darkness that the natural sciences were when Linneus and Cuvier and Lamarck ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... city!" Moses did not see clearly in the misty morning, for there was no wall, but only the giant Og who sat upon the wall with his feet touching the ground below. [685] Considering Og's enormous stature, Moses' mistake was pardonable, for as a grave-digger of later times related, Og's thigh-bone alone measured more than three parasangs. "Once," so records Abba Saul, "I hunted a stag which fled into the thigh bone of a dead man. I pursued it and ran along three parasangs of the thigh-bone, yet had not reached its end." This ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... near the half-finished bridge, which crossed the river obliquely. The track approached its end in a curve and then stopped where a noisy steam-digger was at work. Between the machine and the bridge, the hillside fell in a very steep slope to the water, which rolled in angry turmoil past its foot, and the channel dividing the bank from the island that supported the central bridge-pier was deep. Here and there a slab of rock projected ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... nurse and is out on the dunes watching the figure as it is intermittently illuminated by the gleam of a revolving lighthouse further up the coast. He is in an exalted mood. There is some comic relief in the grave-digger manner between him and a joiner, who is also the undertaker of the island, a well-conceived character. A storm is rising. Gabriel, after many wild and whirling words, leaves a message for his friends. He is bathing. And so he makes by suicide his last flight, his escape from the horns ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... The old grave-digger thrust his spade into the newly, upturned sod, and said to George, whom he did not recognize, "Yes, I can show you the grave, but the tomb-stone is still missing. His heirs have set up no stone, and probably will never erect one. They have forgotten ...
— After Long Years and Other Stories • Translated from the German by Sophie A. Miller and Agnes M. Dunne
... These books are hardly opened now—they are antiquated, and more than antiquated; they are full of mistakes as to facts, and mistakes as to the conclusions drawn from them. But they had ushered new ideas into the world of thought, and they left on many, as they did on me, that feeling which the digger who prospects for minerals is said to have, that there must be gold beneath the surface, if people would only dig. That feeling was very vague as yet, and might have been entirely deceptive, nor did I see my way to go beyond ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... black-headed Highlandmen, with illustrious names, in breeches and round hats, without pistols or feathers, is a sorry sight. Not one of these McGregors can earn more than five shillings a day, currency, as a laborer. Not a digger upon our canals but can do better than that; and with the chance of rising. But here there seems be no such opportunity. The colonial system provides that every settler shall have a grant of about one hundred ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... but the posterity of Solomon may be retailing old clothes, and the heirs of the Nebuchadnezzar dynasty still exist somewhere—perhaps among our graziers or cattle-dealers, our keepers of dairies or secretaries of agricultural associations. The line of Tamerlane may have ended in a grave-digger, and that of Frederick Barbarossa in a hair-dresser. The ideal transmigration of Pythagoras was not more improbable or more wonderful than the strange metamorphoses through which, in the course of centuries, the living representatives of kings ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 419, New Series, January 10, 1852 • Various
... Ballarat. I had given the thing a trial. For the most odious weeks I had been a licensed digger on Black Hill Flats; and I had actually failed to make running expenses. That, however, will surprise you the less when I pause to declare that I have paid as much as four shillings and sixpence for half a loaf of ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... work was particularly hard on account of the tree-stumps that had to be dodged. Later the stumps were all dug and chopped out to make way for the McCormick reaper, and because I proved to be the best chopper and stump-digger I had nearly all of it to myself. It was dull, hard work leaning over on my knees all day, chopping out those tough oak and hickory stumps, deep down below the crowns of the big roots. Some, though fortunately not many, were two feet ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... many there be who have tried it. Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time i have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals, and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while in the earlier geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters now almost completely ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... with the grave-digger's wife, and from thence she went to the count's splendid country-seat, where she lived in handsome rooms, and was dressed in silks and fineries; not a breath of wind was to blow on her; no one dared to say a rough word to her, nothing was ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... uncovered the inspector said to the grave-digger: "Open it." They obeyed, as if it were the most natural thing ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... remarks were made in the audience. Presently an elderly lady—a Mrs. Maginley—arose and expressed her opinions. She had confidence in Mr. Lincoln, but denounced Gen. Banks, who, she said, was a hero in one place and a slave-driver in another. As next President, we may get a ditch-digger—(Mrs. M. evidently intended this as a sly allusion to a distinguished military chieftain)—and then what are we to do? She wished to know who, loving the black man, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... mediator between the production and consumption of leather; or the cloth merchant, who cuts the material from the piece, an assistant preparatory to the tailor. The labor of commerce is especially like that of the fisherman or the turf digger, because they produce only in so far as they transfer goods from inaccessible to accessible places. See, however, Rau, Lehrbuch, I, 103. See the demonstration of the productive power of commerce in general, as well as of what is, by way of preference, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... would mean a great increase of expense to the Government. It was equally clear that, as the law had been declared over and over again in the colony, unauthorized digging on Crown land constituted a trespass, for which the digger was legally responsible. But the Governor was wise enough to see that no threats of prosecution would deter men bent on digging in unoccupied lands, even if it were possible to preserve the lands of private ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... the so-called unities, of action and time and place, is one of his latest plays—The Tempest. But he was an Englishman, and would have been jealous of his freedom and independence. When the grave-digger remarks that it is no great matter if Hamlet do not recover his wits in England, because there the men are as mad as he, the satire has a sympathetic ring in it. Shakespeare did not wish to see the mad English altered. Nor are they likely ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... Farmer Green's garden, to ponder. Who could tell him how long it would take Grunty Pig to uproot the old apple tree? Although Jolly Robin thought and thought, he could think of no one whom he might ask. To be sure, there was Tommy Fox, who was known to be an able digger. But Jolly Robin didn't trust him. Tommy Fox was tricky. And there was Billy Woodchuck, who came from a famous family of burrowers. But everybody knew that old dog Spot had chased him into his hole that very afternoon, and was watching Billy's ...
— The Tale of Grunty Pig - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... gather more; so we buried them in a trench, and covered them, and laid little fires at intervals along the new-stamped earth and set light to those. We did not bury them very deep, because a bayonet is a fool of a weapon with which to excavate a grave and a Syrian no expert digger in any case; so when the fires were burned out we piled rocks on the grave to ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... married life. The most obvious thing to do in Ballarat was to go in for gold-mining, and chance having thrown in her way a mate of her father's, she determined to devote herself to that, being influenced in her decision by the old digger. This man, by name Archibald McIntosh, was a shrewd, hard-headed Scotchman, who had been in Ballarat when the diggings were in the height of their fame, and who knew all about the lie of the country ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... Abraham making use of them and so occupying the country. The same thing is done in Sahara. When an enemy is to be exterminated, or robbers repulsed from a particular district, the wells are stopped up. Wells are also named by the digger of them. A man who goes to the expense of digging out a well, if peradventure he finds water, has the privilege of giving to it his own name. There is one on the route from Mourzuk to Tripoli called Mukni or ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... liking the chap," would shout Lingard when telling the story; and looking around at the eyes that glittered at him through the smoke of cheroots, this Brixham trawler-boy, afterward a youth in colliers, deep-water man, gold-digger, owner and commander of "the finest brig afloat," knew that by his listeners—seamen, traders, adventurers like himself—this was accepted not as the expression of a feeling, but as the highest commendation he ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... saw they were the sensiblest lot of working men we ever laid eyes on; not at all inclined to make a row for nothing—quite the other way. But the shutting off of public-houses led to sly grog tents, where they made the digger pay a pound a bottle for his grog, and didn't ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... Island, cottonwoods—Ah, here we are. 'The aborigines of the Andaman Islands may perhaps claim the distinction of being the smallest race upon this earth, though some anthropologists prefer the Bushmen of Africa, the Digger Indians of America, and the Terra del Fuegians. The average height is rather below four feet, although many full-grown adults may be found who are very much smaller than this. They are a fierce, morose, ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... The Minstrel Ballad of the banished and returning Count The Violet The Faithless Boy The Erl-King Johanna Sebus The Fisherman The King of Thule The Beauteous Flower.. Sir Curt's Wedding Journey Wedding Song The Treasure-digger The Rat-catcher The Spinner Before a Court of Justice The Page and the Miller's Daughter The Youth and the Millstream The Maid of the Mill's Treachery The Maid of the Mill's Repentance The Traveller and the Farm-Maiden Effects at a distance The Walking ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... the party was divided into squads of five each, which gave the men one night on duty and two off, Rose assigning each man to the branch of work in which experiments proved him the most proficient. He was himself, by long odds, the best digger of the party; while Hamilton had no equal for ingenious mechanical skill in contriving helpful, little devices to overcome or lessen the difficulties that beset almost every step ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... too late. The place was rushed. In other words, diggers swarmed to the spot, with no idea of law but digger's law. ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... passions in life—love of Jefferson Doman, who had once been of some service to him, and love of whisky, which certainly had not. He had been among the first in the rush to Hurdy-Gurdy, but had not prospered, and had sunk by degrees to the position of grave digger. This was not a vocation, but Barney in a desultory way turned his trembling hand to it whenever some local misunderstanding at the card table and his own partial recovery from a prolonged debauch occurred coincidently in point of time. One day Mr. Doman received, at Red ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... children: three daughters and a son, who was the heir to the throne. One day the king said to the prince: "My son, I have decided to marry your three sisters to the first persons who pass our palace at noon." At that time there first passed a swine-herd, then a huntsman, and finally a grave-digger. The king had them all three summoned to his presence, and told the swine-herd that he wished to give him his oldest daughter for a wife, the second to the huntsman, and the third to the grave-digger. Those poor creatures thought they were dreaming. But they ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... live by their brains, than among artisans and subduers of the soil. This is an error. Tobacco is less a fosterer of thought than a solace of mental vacuity. The thinker smokes in the intervals of work, impatient of ennui as well as of lassitude, and the ploughman, the digger, the blacksmith or the teamster, lights his cutty for the same reason. No true worker, be he digger, or divine, blends real work with either smoking or drinking. Whenever you see a fellow drink or smoke during work, spot him for a gone coon; he will come ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... religion of the future, which is simply universal non-religion, say "Protestantism is the grave digger of Christianity." "But Christianity stoutly refuses to be buried alive," and the multitude of facts that are continually transpiring demonstrate a living, active existence; "its blood circulates; ...
— The Christian Foundation, June, 1880
... of two anvils, the strains of a brass band, the hoisting of a new flag on the liberty-pole, and later the ceremony of the Ditch opening, when a distinguished speaker in a most unworkman-like tall hat, black frock coat, and white cravat, which gave him the general air of a festive grave-digger, took a spade from the hands of an apparently hilarious chief mourner and threw out the first sods. There were anvils, brass bands, and a "collation" at the hotel. But everywhere—overriding the most extravagant expectation and even the laughter it provoked—the ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... and other abnormal manifestations of the sexual impulse which may be practiced merely faute de mieux and not as, in the strict sense, perversions of the impulse. Even necrophily may be thus practiced. A young man who when assisting the grave-digger conceived and carried out the idea of digging up the bodies of young girls to satisfy his passions with, and whose case has been recorded by Belletrud and Mercier, said: "I could find no young girl who would agree to yield ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... works, they undergo, as traffic progresses, many improvements. Ballast is laid down. Iron or steel bridges are substituted for timber. The gorges spanned by trestles are, one by one, filled up, by the use of the steam digger to fill, and the ballast plough to push out, the stuff from the flat bottomed wagons on each side and through the interstices of, the trestles. Sometimes the timber is left in; sometimes it is drawn out and used elsewhere. This trestle ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... bald somnambulist as missing from his flat We take soundings for the digger with a prop. By the day the board is gratis, by the week it's half of that; For the season there's a ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... together may come the solemn and the grotesque! the ludicrous and the majestic!" said the schoolmaster. "Here, to us lingering in awe about the doors beyond which lie the gulfs of the unknown—to our very side come the wright and the grave digger with their talk of the strength of coffins and the judgment of the ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... don't you see? I wanted to make him call her awful names, and say that he hated her, that he was a murderer and a horse-thief, and that he had killed a policeman, and that he was thinking of becoming a Digger Injin, and having a Digger squaw for a wife, which he liked better than her. Lord! dad, you ought to have seen what stuff I made up." The boy burst into a shrill, half-feminine laugh, and Steptoe, catching the infection, laughed loudly in his ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... cold and starvation; and after thus having lost much of his substance, he eventually worked his way back to Bloemhof with the remainder, sold them for anything they could fetch, and went to work for a digger. ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... surely very unlikely as we were all old travellers, three of my party and myself had at one time been gold-diggers, a mode of life well calculated to give the necessary experience in this way. And as for Captain Alison, who had never been a gold-digger, I observed on the island that his tent was particularly ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... was burying one of my dead selves, the grave-digger came by and said to me, "Of all those who come here to bury, you alone ...
— The Madman • Kahlil Gibran
... important as the domine was the voorleezer or chorister, who was also generally the bell-ringer, sexton, grave-digger, funeral inviter, schoolmaster, and sometimes town clerk. He "tuned the psalm"; turned the hour-glass; gave out the psalms on a hanging board to the congregation; read the Bible; gave up notices to the domine by sticking the papers ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... of the Pebbles, from the galleries dug in a roadside bank by the Colletes (A short-tongued Burrowing-bee known also as the Melitta.—Translator's Note.) and lastly from the cavities made by some digger or other in the ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... he shut himself up, lovingly devoting his whole time to the study of natural history. He was particularly fond of physiology. It was known in the town that he frequently purchased dead bodies from the hospital grave-digger, a circumstance which rendered him an object of horror to delicate ladies and certain timid gentlemen. Fortunately, they did not actually look upon him as a sorcerer; but his practice diminished, and he was regarded ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... dig in here will think she's a patient—unless the digger knows that this room is supposed to be occupied by one Steve Cornell, obviously male. Now, Steve, ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... character. When in harvest time, after sundown—when the shadows forbid farther cutting with the fagging hook at the tall wheat—he sits on the form without, under the elm tree, and feels a whole pocketful of silver, flush of money like a gold-digger at a fortunate rush, he does not indulge in Allsopp or Guinness. He hoarsely orders a 'pot' of some local brewer's manufacture—a man who knows exactly what he likes, and arranges to meet the hardy digestion of ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... Mathieu,' indicating the spot where he lay. He shortly returned and said, 'I had to "chiv" that fellow, he was not dead,' a cant word, meaning that he had to stab him. Returning to the road we passed where De Pontius lay and was dead. Sullivan said, 'This is the digger, the others were all storekeepers; this is the digger, let's cover him up, for should the others be found, they'll think he done it and sloped,' meaning he had gone. So with that we threw all the stones on him, and then left him. This bloody work took ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... teaching. Oh! there are many Christians who find the best time of the day is the time when they can get with their Bibles, and who love nothing so much as to get a new thought; and as a diamond digger rejoices when he has found a diamond, or a gold digger when he has found a nugget, they delight when they get from the Bible some new thought, and they feed upon it. Yet with all that interest in God's word, ...
— 'Jesus Himself' • Andrew Murray
... all glad to see Mr. Coyote. And after Benny's ill luck, the smile upon Mr. Coyote's face made the disappointed digger feel almost peevish. ...
— The Tale of Benny Badger • Arthur Scott Bailey
... Milan, both cuirass and helm, Abelards, Eloisas, and Father Anselm: There were jewels, and gold, and the amulet's power, A hero to spout, and to rant by the hour; A lady to love, and be loved, and to faint, As a matter of course, turning pale through her paint! There were clowns who the grave-digger clown could outvie, And princes who on the stage strutted so high That Prince Hamlet they'd cut; who could pick up a scull, Vote his morals a bore, and his wit mighty dull! There were spirits that roam in the caves of the deep, Coming back to our earth, as ghosts will do, to peep! ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... locomotive runs off the track, or the measles set in. A wise physician once said to me: "I observe that every one wishes to go to heaven, but I observe that most people are willing to take a great deal of very disagreeable medicine first." The lives that one least envies—as of the Digger Indian or the outcast boy in the city—are yet sweet to the living. "They have only a pleasure like that of the brutes," we say with scorn. But what a racy and substantial pleasure is that! The flashing speed of the swallow in the air, the cool play of the minnow in the water, ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Ammophila, the Cerceris and the Languedocian Sphex, Digger-wasps described in other of ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... song-birds, with their sweet human voices, appears to be more common and unfailing than love for flowers. Every one loves flowers to some extent, at least in life's fresh morning, attracted by them as instinctively as humming-birds and bees. Even the young Digger Indians have sufficient love for the brightest of those found growing on the mountains to gather them and braid them, as decorations for the hair. And I was glad to discover, through the few Indians ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... callers who wanted to hear the story all over again from Peter himself. So Peter was obliged to repeat it ever so many times, and every time it sounded to him more foolish than before. He had to tell it to Jimmy Skunk and to Johnny Chuck and to Danny Meadow Mouse and to Digger the Badger and to Sammy Jay and to Blacky the Crow and to Striped Chipmunk and to Happy Jack Squirrel and to Bobby Coon and to Unc' Billy Possum and to Old ...
— The Adventures of Prickly Porky • Thornton W. Burgess
... meal begins; it consists of "rusks," a kind of bread baked until it becomes crisp and hard, and plenty of steaming hot coffee. I never saw any people so fond of this beverage as the Boers are. The Australian bushman and digger loves tea, and can almost exist upon it; but these Boers cling to coffee. They live, when out in laager, like Spartans, they dress anyhow, sleep anyhow, and eat just rusks and precious little else. Talk about "Tommy" and his hard times, why a private soldier at the front sleeps ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... he was on the hill beyond the upper end of the camp kneeling beside an open grave; and in his clasped hands, uplifted high above his head, he held a naked bowie-knife. Some light still lingered here among the stiff-branched digger-pines, a faint reflection of the sunset far beyond the flat lands of the San Joaquin valley. It shone upon his face revealing a multitude of lines, so deeply scored, so terrible in their proclamation of deadly hate, that the sight of them would have startled the most case-hardened member of the ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... said. "I am Fray Juan de la Cruz, at your service; from the convent of N. S. de la Pena near by. I have to be my own grave-digger; but will you be so obliging as to commit the body while I ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... a character round there. If he was handy and no woman to be had, he was always sent to break the news to the wife of a digger or bushman who had met with an accident. He was old, and world-wise, and had great tact—also great experience in such matters. Bad news had been broken to him so many times that he had become hardened to it, and he had broken bad news so ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... cradle into which the lump of gold weighing two ounces and three-quarters—the largest piece ever found at the Mormon diggings—was about to have been shovelled, when it was discovered and seized hold of by the fortunate digger—the gentleman on my right hand—who, as you all know, in accordance with the admirable laws of these diggings, laid claim to it as his private property." This produced a roar of laughter; but, what was better, it produced a roar of biddings, and the cradle was knocked ...
— California • J. Tyrwhitt Brooks
... fenced in, to avoid the drawbacks of a public way; an abandoned, barren, sun-scorched bit of land, favoured by thistles and by Wasps and Bees. Here, without fear of being troubled by the passers-by, I could consult the Ammophila and the Sphex (two species of Digger-or Hunting-wasps.—Translator's Note.) and engage in that difficult conversation whose questions and answers have experiment for their language; here, without distant expeditions that take up my time, without tiring rambles that strain my nerves, I could ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... expectant semicircle on the sun-baked turf in front of Miss Musgrave's dwelling. She was usually outside to welcome the first comers, and her absence naturally formed the staple topic of conversation. Digger after digger arrived, threw himself down, and joined in the general wonderment as to why Miss Mary wasn't there, and at last some one hazarded a suggestion that she "must be asleep." There was a general epidemic of noisy coughing for a full minute, ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... of Luc's house. The doctors who had held the autopsy were there, Captain Mancel and Foison, who was in great agitation, although he tried to hide it, at having to assist at the exhumation of his victim. They started for the cemetery, and the grave-digger did his work. After fifteen minutes the shovel struck the board that covered d'Ache's body, and soon after the corpse was seen. The beard had grown thick and strong. Foison gazed at it. It was indeed the man with ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... are carried on in this wilderness. These people literally dig their bread out of earth and stone and ant-heaps, scrape it off the trees, distill it out of uneatable fruit. There is the root-digger, whose booty of mountain ovens is said to go to far Turkey to be turned into scent. He would long have given up digging, to live entirely on poaching, but for his hope to unearth some day treasure of gold and jewels. One of these "forest-devils" ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... one of the keenest criminal judges in Spain. Within a very few days he discovered that the corpse to which this skull belonged had been buried in a rough wooden coffin which the grave digger had taken home with him, intending to use it for firewood. Fortunately, the man had not yet burned it up, and on the lid the judge managed to decipher the initials: "A.G.R." together with the date of interment. He had at once searched the parochial ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... uneasily if the stiffness of his expression was not a thing which Conscience could read like print; if the simple-minded clam-digger had not quite unintentionally ripped away the mask which he had, until now, ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... regarded it as a discreditable performance, unworthy a great and generous nation. The Mormon question followed, and on this he had much curious information. Living in the interior of New York State, he had heard Joseph Smith's history from its beginning, when he posed as "a money digger" and a seer who could read the future through "a peek stone." The recent polygamous teachings of the prophet were a matter to mention with lowered voice. Miss Gillespie, riding on the other side, was not supposed to hear, and certainly appeared ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... grandest nation on the globe. By right no privileged caste or class. Education free to all. The humblest digger in the ditch has all the civil, social, and religious rights with the highest in the land. The poorest woman at the wash-tub may be the mother of a future President. Here all are heirs-apparent to the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... brutal Haole drinking with him, one that had been a boatswain of a whaler, a runaway, a digger in gold mines, a convict in prisons. He had a low mind and a foul mouth; he loved to drink and to see others drunken; and he pressed the glass upon Keawe. Soon there was no more ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... respiratory apparatus. In the first stage of the affection, there is an incessant dry cough, particularly at night, and all the prominent symptoms of bronchitis are present. Indeed, from the time a man becomes a coal-digger, and inhales this noxious air,[6] there is ever after a manifest irritation in the lining membrane of the respiratory passages, which is apparent before carbon in any quantity can be supposed to be lodged in the lungs. The mucous membrane of the air passages, by its continually ...
— An Investigation into the Nature of Black Phthisis • Archibald Makellar
... was not a dull digger in heaps of ancient lore was owing to his imaginative power,—the second of the qualities which we have distinguished as dominating his literary temperament. "I can see as many castles in the clouds as any man," ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... and resentment of contempt. It was egotism masquerading as altruism. It was a dancing bear lumbering at the heels of insanity. Of all the passions it was the most hypocritical—a snare-setter, a digger of pitfalls, an enemy disguised as one's dearest friend. He thanked God there was no hint of love in his new-found friendship. Like an outcast fleeing from a storm, he had blundered against the door of this woman's charity, had felt it yield beneath his touch, and had found himself immersed ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... terror resorted to the bal-shem for amulets and talismans. On every door could be read the inscription, "Not at home." But the cholera would not be put off by so flimsy a device and entered unbidden. Even the death of a grave-digger did not stay the dread disease, although it had been prophesied that such an event would end the trouble. The cabalistic books were ransacked for charms and mystic signs with which to resist the power of the conqueror, but ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... if I succeeded I should come back to bring her plenty and happiness, but if I failed I should never look upon her face again. I kissed her hand and the baby once, and slipped out of the room. Three nights after I was out at sea, bound for Melbourne, a steerage passenger with a digger's tools for my baggage, and seven shillings in my pocket. After three and a half years of hard and bitter struggles on the goldfields, at last I struck it rich, realised twenty thousand pounds, and a fortnight later I took my passage for England. All this ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... distorted values, didn't I? That was temper, pure and simple. You were perfectly right to wail like one of your own Banshees because the likes of me—once content when the pale shadow of Pegasus passed her by—is become an ink-spattered, carbon-grimed gold digger! Ten months ago, shivering and quivering over "ONE CROWDED HOUR," I cowered back in my semi-occasional taxicab and watched the meter with a creeping scalp.... Now I can ride from Yonkers to the Square and admire the scenery all the way. But this isn't what ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... street in case you might have to buy her an ice-cream, and you can always raise a headache on garden-party or picnic nights. The class of economists mentioned seem unable to realize that a man, young or old, is worth his salt, if he works honestly, whether he be a sewer-digger or a clerk who spends ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... dead" (it is the sacristan who is speaking,) "was in his lifetime a grave-digger. He was of an agreeable disposition, the result, no doubt, of the calling he followed, for it has often been pointed out that people who work in cemeteries are of a jovial turn. Death has no terrors for them; they never give it a thought. I, for instance, ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... in some lateral fissure. He had sent hurriedly for Tom Bent—that clever young engineer at the wheat ranch, who was always studying up these things with his inventions—and that was his opinion. No, Tom was not a well-digger, but it was generally known that he had "located" one or two, and had long ago advised the tapping of that flow by a second boring, in case of just such an emergency. He was coming again to-morrow. By the way, he had asked how the young lady ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... barber chairs, our beards were taken off, and the officiating artists were ordered to give each man's hair "a decent cut." We found that according to the penitentiary code, the decent way of wearing the hair was to cut it all off—if the same rule had been adopted with regard to clothing, the Digger Indians would have been superfluously clad in comparison with (what would have been), our disheveled condition. Some young men lost beards and moustaches on this occasion, which they had assiduously cultivated with scanty returns, for years. Colonel Smith had a magnificent ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... the door of Johnny Chuck and called softly, and Johnny Chuck awoke from his long sleep and yawned and began to think about getting up. She knocked at the door of Digger the Badger, and Digger awoke. She tickled the nose of Striped Chipmunk, who was about half awake, and Striped Chipmunk sneezed and then he hopped out of bed and hurried up to his doorway to shout good morning ...
— The Adventures of Johnny Chuck • Thornton W. Burgess
... so friable and poor that the Greek burglar was known as a "Wall-digger." It did not pay him to pick a lock; it was simpler for him to quarry his way through ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... me for Johnny Ged's Hole now,' [the grave-digger's] Quoth I, 'if that thae news be true! [those] His braw calf-ward whare gowans grew [grazing-plot, daisies] Sae white and bonnie, Nae doubt they'll rive it wi' the plew; [split] They'll ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... fields had to be dug, and dug thoroughly with wooden spades. Long-handled and pointed at the end, these implements resembled stilts with a cross-bar about eighteen inches from the ground on which the digger's foot rested. Two men worked them together. The women did not dig the fields, but theirs was the labour almost as severe of carrying on their backs the heavy baskets of gravel to scatter over ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... on that back seat to Gumbolt to-night, or I'll ride in Jim Digger's hearse. I am layin' for him anyhow." The voice was ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... side of the tree he took refuge, he would be in range of one of them. With a howl of consternation, he whirled on his heel and ran like a frightened deer. As he did so, he ducked his head and leaped from side to side, after the manner of the Digger Indians of the present day, with a view of distracting ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... myself, 'is it not enough that I have been the cause of her death, must I be her executioner too? must I be the grave-digger to my own child? must I be the ill-fated he who is to stretch her cold limbs in the grave, and send my own life's blood back again to its mother earth? Why am I called upon to do this, oh cruel, most cruel destiny? Cannot I fly from the horrid scene? Cannot I rather run a dagger into my heart? ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... was a little shocked when Hamlet's mother became Pantaloon, and was instantly knocked down by Clown Claudius. Grimaldi is getting a little old now, but for real humor there are few clowns like him. Mr. Shuter, as the grave-digger, was chaste and comic, as he always is, and the ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to dig, with whatsoever object, for he tucked up his cuffs and spat on his hands, and then went at it like an old digger as he was. He had no design upon the pole, except that he measured a shovel's length from it before beginning, nor was it his purpose to dig deep. Some dozen or so of expert strokes sufficed. Then, he stopped, looked down into the cavity, bent over it, and took out ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... of that wife of a counselor of Cologne,[564] who having been interred with a valuable ring on her finger, in 1571, the grave-digger opened the grave the succeeding night to steal the ring. But the good lady caught hold of him, and forced him to take her out of the coffin. He, however, disengaged himself from her hands, and fled. The resuscitated lady went and rapped at the ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it. Ere entering upon the subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time i have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals, and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while in the earlier geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters now almost completely ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... had piled theirselfs in heeps, in various parts of the room, presentin a picter which JOHN B. GOFF could work up to sich an affectin pitch, that tears could be got out of the eyes of a perfessional grave-digger. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 36, December 3, 1870 • Various
... richer for a large experience of the world; Raphael Pumpelly and Clarence King, at about the same time, were enriching their education by a picturesque intimacy with the manners of the Apaches and Digger Indians. All experience is an arch, to build upon. Yet Adams admitted himself unable to guess what use his second winter in Germany was to him, or what he expected it to be. Even the doctrine of accidental education broke ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... then, as his wife was amongst strangers, and would be very lonesome if he quitted her. Mr. Stowel was, like Mr. Lawrence, obliged to return without any remuneration, and with less money than he came. I mention these two freaks of Joe Smith, as they explain the money-digger's system of fraud. ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... carry out. There is nothing like a good definite plan,—not cast-iron, you know, but flexible and modified by circumstances as you go along, yet so clear and defined as to give you something to aim at. Confound it, that's what's the matter with our military authorities. If McClellan is a ditch-digger let them put a general in command; or, if he is a general, give him what he wants and let him alone. There is no head, no plan. I confess, however, that just now I am chiefly interested in your campaigns, which, after all, stand the best chance of bringing about union, in spite of your ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... called him, the whilom digger of graves, who had so puzzled Commander Nesbitt on the first day of his joining, by giving his profession so peculiar a designation, had come on board without any sort of an outfit for ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... churchyards may be remarked here—the reluctance to bury on the north side of the church (though strangely enough this has been reversed at near-by Ferring). In many churchyards, where the ground is as extensive on the north side as on the others, the grave digger's spade has left it either quite untouched or the graves are few in number ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... was coming hot on his leg. The gray horse stumbled; its breath came and went in sobs. Now they were neck and neck again. Then it was over, the little brown mare swept by, and Ralston's rope, cutting the air, dropped about the neck of the insignificant, white "digger" that ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... them and Charnock near the half-finished bridge, which crossed the river obliquely. The track approached its end in a curve and then stopped where a noisy steam-digger was at work. Between the machine and the bridge, the hillside fell in a very steep slope to the water, which rolled in angry turmoil past its foot, and the channel dividing the bank from the island that supported the central bridge-pier was deep. Here and there a slab of rock projected from the ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... is a stone pedestal supporting a great wooden cross. Storms have bent the strip of tin on which were the I. N. R. I., and the rain has washed off the letters. At the foot of the cross is a confused heap of bones and skulls thrown out by the grave-digger. Everywhere grow in all their vigor the bitter-sweet and rose-bay. Some tiny flowerets, too, tint the ground—blossoms which, like the mounded bones, are known to their Creator only. They are like little pale smiles, and their odor scents of the tomb. Grass and climbing plants fill the corners, ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... and dismounted the position was most cleverly concealed by a higher hill in front and the heavy woods which served as a screen for the artillery. I noticed many holes where the French shells had burst, and the valley to the north looked as if some one had been experimenting with a well digger. One 21-centimeter shell had cut a swath about 100 yards long out of the woods on the hill where we dismounted. The trees were twisted from their stumps as if a small cyclone had passed, and one could realize the damage the shells could do merely ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... camping out. This is surely very unlikely as we were all old travellers, three of my party and myself had at one time been gold-diggers, a mode of life well calculated to give the necessary experience in this way. And as for Captain Alison, who had never been a gold-digger, I observed on the island that his ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... surprize at the number of skulls thrown upon the stage. To which Jones answered, "That it was one of the most famous burial-places about town." "No wonder then," cries Partridge, "that the place is haunted. But I never saw in my life a worse grave-digger. I had a sexton, when I was clerk, that should have dug three graves while he is digging one. The fellow handles a spade as if it was the first time he had ever had one in his hand. Ay, ay, you may sing. You had rather sing than work, I believe."—Upon Hamlet's taking up the skull, he ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... so we buried them in a trench, and covered them, and laid little fires at intervals along the new-stamped earth and set light to those. We did not bury them very deep, because a bayonet is a fool of a weapon with which to excavate a grave and a Syrian no expert digger in any case; so when the fires were burned out we piled rocks on the grave ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... knowing how to tunnel in wood, dig deep pits in the ground, or make nests of mud. Mr. Kellogg, a very wise man, and young to be so wise, tells of one interesting little wasp, called the thread-waisted sand-digger, which lives in California in the salt-marshes. These marshes are covered by plants, but in between are little smooth places covered with a glistening crust of salt. It is in these open spots that ...
— Little Busybodies - The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies • Jeanette Augustus Marks and Julia Moody
... they have built up a new wall about the city!" Moses did not see clearly in the misty morning, for there was no wall, but only the giant Og who sat upon the wall with his feet touching the ground below. [685] Considering Og's enormous stature, Moses' mistake was pardonable, for as a grave-digger of later times related, Og's thigh-bone alone measured more than three parasangs. "Once," so records Abba Saul, "I hunted a stag which fled into the thigh bone of a dead man. I pursued it and ran along ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... was called, had been grave-digger at Rehoboth for upwards of fifty years, and so rooted were his customs that none cared to call them in question. For minister and deacons he showed little respect. Boys and girls fled from before his shadow; and the ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... ignorant, arrogant, and wicked system which has been pursued? Such a career of madness and of folly was, I believe, never run in so short a period. The vigour of the ministry is like the vigour of a grave-digger—the tomb becomes more ready and more wide for every effort which they make.... Every Englishman felt proud of the integrity of his country; the character of the country is lost for ever. It is of the utmost consequence to a commercial people ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... was still hanging from the tree. When I got back to the 'hotel' - a place not much better than the shed at Yuba Forks - I found a newspaper with an account of the affair. Drawing a chair up to the stove, I was deep in the story, when a huge rowdy-looking fellow in digger-costume ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... dominant factors in the life of Redwood Camp. His submissive gentleness, his unquestioned modesty, his half refinement, and his amiable exterior consequently availed him nothing against the fact that he was missed during a raid of the Digger Indians, and lied to account for it; or that he lost his right to a gold discovery by failing to make it good against a bully, and selfishly kept this discovery from the knowledge of the camp. Yet this weakness awakened no animosity in his companions, and it is probable that ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... could have believed it possible for a mole to be. And it was grey instead of black, the grey hairs being so abundant on the head as to make it almost white, as in the case of old Watch. He supposed that it was a very old mole, that it was a more powerful digger than most of its kind, and had perhaps escaped death so long on account of its strength and of its habit of feeding deeper in the ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... Old bone-patcher, old digger in men's flesh, Doctors are ever itching to be priests, Meddling in conduct, natures, life's privacies. We have been coupled now for twenty years, And she has never turned from me an hour— She knows a woman's duty and a queen's: Whose, then, can her affection be but mine? ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... Mrs. Nesbit regarded as inferior even to the Dooleys because of the vast Calvin pretense—"Jim, Laura has inherited that common Indiana streak of yours. I can't make her a Satterthwaite—she's Indiana to the bone. Why, when I go to town with her, every drayman and ditch digger and stableman calls to her, and the yard is always full of their towheaded children. I'll ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... cave or vault finished; when on a sudden (it seems I had made it too large) a great quantity of earth fell down from the top and one side: so much, that, in short, it frightened me, and not without reason too; for if I had been under it, I should never have wanted a grave-digger. Upon this disaster, I had a great deal of work to do over again, for I had the loose earth to carry out; and, which was of more importance, I had the ceiling to prop up, so that I might be sure no more would ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe Of York, Mariner, Vol. 1 • Daniel Defoe
... (sayes Carneades) that there is great Difference betwixt the being able to make Experiments, and the being able to give a Philosophical Account of them. And I will not now add, that many a Mine-digger may meet, whilst he follows his work, with a Gemm or a Mineral which he knowes not what to make of, till he shews it a Jeweller or a Mineralist to be inform'd what it is. But that which I would rather have here ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... the usual Queensland mining type, a dozen or so of bark-roofed humpies, a public-house with the title of "The Digger's Best," a blacksmith's forge, ...
— Chinkie's Flat and Other Stories - 1904 • Louis Becke
... nephew of ours said he wanted to be a ditch-digger. Asked why, he said: "So I can wear dirty clothes, smoke a pipe, and spit tobacco juice in the street." The little fellow is really endowed with an inheritance of great natural refinement and a splendid intellect. As he grows older, ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... reopen the grave. Presently the spade struck upon wood, and by and by part of the coffin came in view. That was nothing, for the resurrectionists had a way of breaking the coffin at one end and drawing out the body with tongs. The digger knew this. He broke the boards with the spade and revealed an arm. The people convinced, he dropped the arm savagely, leaped out of the grave and went his way, leaving them to shovel back the ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... with unused riches, Who robs the toiler to swell his hoard, Who beats down the wage of the digger of ditches, And steals the bread from the ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... colonel, as a whilom resident of the Indian Territories, was supposed to be familiar. Indeed, the next week's INTELLIGENCER contained some vile doggerel supposed to be an answer to Mrs. Tretherick's poem, ostensibly written by the wife of a Digger Indian chief, accompanied by a glowing ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... drawls in his talk. He drinks whiskey by the tank. His oaths are to his words as Falstaff's sack to his bread. I have seen Maltese beggars, Arab camel-drivers, Dominican friars, New-York aldermen, Digger Indians; the foulest, frowziest creatures I have ever ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... and with difficulty, through the busy streets. The brief burial service was ended before they reached the cemetery, but Meg was in time to show Robin the plate upon the coffin before the grave-digger shovelled down great spadefuls of earth upon it. They stood watching, with sad but childish curiosity, till all was finished; and then Meg, with a heavy and troubled heart, took them home again to their lonely attic ...
— Little Meg's Children • Hesba Stretton
... must remember what is bad for the master must be equally bad for the man. So if a Doctor is excluded, a Chemist, an Undertaker, and a Grave-digger would also be kept away. A Lawyer would carry with him Judges, Magistrates, Clerks, and Law Stationers. The Clergy would represent everyone connected with a church, from an Archbishop to a Bell-ringer. Then, if we are ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 17, 1892 • Various
... woman undertakes to do a thing, she has always a reason for her undertaking; argoul, as my friend, the grave-digger, said, the heroine of this Epic must have had an object in view. Otherwise, what would take her to the Cupboard? She was evidently a strong-minded woman, and would not fritter away her valuable time for nothing. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... the grave-digger's wife, and from thence she went to the count's splendid country-seat, where she lived in handsome rooms, and was dressed in silks and fineries; not a breath of wind was to blow on her; no one dared to say a rough word to her, nothing was to be done to annoy her; for she nursed the ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... off, Hickey," said Sullivan, "phat the divil does yez know av foightin' injuns? Phat were ye over in the auld sod? Nathin' but a turf digger. Phat were ye here before ye 'listed? Dom ye, I think ye belong to the Clan na Gael and helped to murther poor Doc ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... from 22 to 25 shifts of 8 hours each to strike bedrock, bedrock being from 90 to 95 ft. below datum, and datum being 15 ft. below street grade; figure 2 diggers to the shift in all caissons over 5 ft. in diameter, 45 cts. per hour for each digger; figure 1 top man at 40 cts. per hour, and 1 mucker or common laborer at 30 cts. per hour for all caissons in which there are two diggers, and 1 top man less if 1 digger is in the caisson, which condition exists generally in caissons ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... affair stands out in strong contrast against these recollections. It was only natural that one of the young chorus ladies with whom I had to practise daily should know how to attract my attentions. Therese Ringelmann, the daughter of a grave-digger, thanks to her beautiful soprano voice, led me to believe that I could make a great singer of her. After I told her of this ambitious scheme, she paid much attention to her appearance, and dressed elegantly ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... this ... the haunting face of the sewer digger came back to Judd ... came back in such a ludicrous light that Judd looked at Barley and laughed. Get him out of the hole? Certainly he would! The other players—grim, tired, water-soaked—saw Judd laugh. ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman
... on awhile, en bimeby ole mars say, 'Well, a bahgin's a bahgin, but you en me is good fren's, en I doan wan' ter see you lose all de money you paid fer dat digger [sic]; en ef w'at you say is so, en I ain't 'sputin' it, he ain't wuf much now. I spec's you wukked him too ha'd dis summer, er e'se de swamps down here don't agree wid de san'-hill nigger. So you des lemme know, en ef he gits any wusser I'll be willin' ter gib yer ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... us that he is making (April 1866,) some modifications of his machinery. He employs a revolving digger to take up the peat from the bed, and carry it to the machine. At the time of going to press, we do not learn whether he regards his experiments as leading to a ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, in which he is to perform his original part, the Grave-maker. Tickets may be had at the Mitre Tavern in Fleet Street." Colley Cibber says that Underhill was particularly admired in the character of the Grave-digger; and he adds: "Underhill was a correct and natural comedian; his particular excellence was in characters that may be called still-life; I mean the stiff, the heavy, and the stupid; to these he gave the exactest and most expressive colours, ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... Chamber of Deputies has organized itself into a chapel. Treasurer and secretary, M. Laborie. Contractor for burials, M. de La Bourdonnaye. Grave-digger, M. Duplessis-Grenedan. Superintendent, M. de Bouville, and in his capacity of vice-president—rattlesnake. Dispenser of holy water (promise-maker), M. de Vitrolles. General of the Capuchins, M. de Villele; and he deserves the post for his voice. ...
— Memoirs To Illustrate The History Of My Time - Volume 1 • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... me as I deserve. Would that I could forget the past! However, I cannot let them lie here to rot." On counting the number of bodies he had hauled out of the water, he found that there were no less than five. The task was abhorrent to his nature. "I little thought that I should ever become a grave-digger!" he exclaimed, bitterly. "However, it must be done; I couldn't rest at night if I knew they were there. I only hope that the sea has washed away the remainder, that I shall not have to bury the whole of my crew; perhaps by ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... were eagerly awaited and claimed by his admiring associates,—stole up from behind and asked, "What is this?" Gustavo, suspecting nothing, went on with his sketch, and answered in a natural tone, "This is Ophelia, plucking the leaves from her garland. That old codger is a grave-digger. Over there..." At this, noticing that every one had risen, and that universal silence reigned, Becquer slowly turned his head. "Here is one too many," said the Director, and the artist ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... work of gradation and distinction. One fact, considered in itself, has no less importance than any other; a lump of charcoal is as valuable as a diamond. But that is the philosophy of brute beasts and Digger Indians. A child, digging on the beach, may shape a heap of sand into a similitude of Vesuvius; but is it nothing that Vesuvius towers above the clouds, and ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... weapons needed with gentry of that class," he said, contemptuously. "Bah! I think more of Digger Injuns." ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... reached the ground, covered with a thick crop of grass, fog, and house-leeks, it resembled an overgrown grave. On inquiry, however, Ravenswood found that the man of the last mattock was absent at a bridal, being fiddler as well as grave-digger to the vicinity. He therefore retired to the little inn, leaving a message that early next morning he would again call for the person whose double occupation connected him at once with the house of mourning and the house ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... doubtless exchanged between the head that made 'The Philosophical Dictionary' and the head that made 'The Social Contract,' When that was done, when the sack was shaken, when Voltaire and Rousseau had been emptied into that hole, a digger seized a spade, threw into the opening the heap of earth, and filled up the grave. The others stamped with their feet upon the ground, so as to remove from it the appearance of having been freshly disturbed. One of the assistants took for his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... post our bald somnambulist as missing from his flat We take soundings for the digger with a prop. By the day the board is gratis, by the week it's half of that; For the season ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... don't go near that equestrian stranger till after I finishes my grub. Alizan, he comes up all shiverin' an' sweatin' an' stands thar; an' mebby in a hour or so I strolls out to the deceased. It shorely wearies me a whole lot when I sees him; he's nothin' but a common Digger buck. You can drink on it if I ain't relieved. Bein' a no-account Injun, of course, I don't paw him over much for brands; but do you know, Pickles, from the casooal glance I gives, it strikes me at the time it's mighty likely to be your oncle. This old bronco fancier's skelp is over on ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... much of. There was hard things said of him, but he could allers strike a blow for a friend, or hold his own with the next man, let him be who he might. You see, there were a good many of us in camp, and we had fair enough luck; for the men over at Digger's Run had struck a good vein, so money was plenty and changed hands fast enough. We'd all hung together in our camp until Clint Bowers got into trouble. None of the rest of us wanted to get mixed up in the fuss, but somehow we did, and the other camp fought shy of us ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... toward a degree of enlightenment which will be in strong contrast with the darker and more ignorant epochs of time, when the practice of medicine was united with the profession of the barber, the well-digger, the farrier, the ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... some their souls; but none seemed to have lost the heart to call up the quiet grin that southern rovers, vagabonds, travellers for "graft" or fortune, and professional wanderers wear in front of it all. Except one man—an elderly eastern digger—he had lost his wife in Sydney while he ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... plan!" suddenly cried the bush. "You are a very good digger, so why can't you dig a tunnel right under me? Start it inside here and curve it up so that it comes outside of my prickly branches, and then you won't ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Travels • Howard R. Garis
... of ferns And wept and wept and wept. It puzzled him. Perchance he feared my mind was going and yet, O, sirs, if you consider it rightly now, With all those ages knocking at his doors, With all that custom clamouring for his care, Is it so strange a grave-digger should weep? Well—he was kind enough and heaped my plate That night at supper. But I could never dig my graves at ease In Peterborough Churchyard. So I came To London—to St. Mary Magdalen's. And thus, I chanced ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... carried low, very near the ground, and on his shoulders is a great hump. No, you wouldn't call him handsome. You would hardly call him good-looking even. In fact, you would, I suspect, call him homely. Certainly there is nothing about him to suggest pride. Yet according to the story Digger the Badger once told Peter Rabbit, pride and nothing less was the cause of that big hump which makes Thunderfoot appear so ...
— Mother West Wind "Where" Stories • Thornton W. Burgess
... not surprising to learn that she grew up to be one of the women who earned the American girl her right to vote. A pioneer in more ways than one, this little carpenter and farmer and well-digger worked for the cause of woman's political equality as she had worked in the Michigan wilderness, and helped on as much as any one woman, the great revolution in people's ideas which makes it possible for women today to express their wishes ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... down in this part of the country, a long, long while ago—so long, that the story must be a true one, because our great-grandfathers implicitly believed it—there officiated as sexton and grave-digger in the churchyard, one Gabriel Grub. It by no means follows that because a man is a sexton, and constantly surrounded by the emblems of mortality, therefore he should be a morose and melancholy man; ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... the domine was the voorleezer or chorister, who was also generally the bell-ringer, sexton, grave-digger, funeral inviter, schoolmaster, and sometimes town clerk. He "tuned the psalm"; turned the hour-glass; gave out the psalms on a hanging board to the congregation; read the Bible; gave up notices to the domine by sticking the papers in the end of a cleft ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... supposed, might even be drained by making the railway across its quivering surface, but hopes of this sort were not to be realised, for it remains to-day a wild, but picturesque stretch of heather and silver birches, where the peat-digger plies his trade with, perhaps, as much profit as the farmer would in tilling it. But as to its power to bear the weight of passing trains the engineers had little doubt. The canal already crossed it, and though in making soundings the surveyors ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... mouth up tight, her eyebrows also, and shook her head, expressing that tortures shouldn't make her say it was a hopeless case. Mrs Wickam then sprinkled a little cooling-stuff about the room, with the air of a female grave-digger, who was strewing ashes on ashes, dust on dust—for she was a serious character—and withdrew to partake of ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... when the excitement had somewhat subsided, and while they were all sitting down quietly to tea, the ladies produced their nuggets, passing them round for inspection, and relating the manner in which they had been found. Lance's experience as a gold-digger now served the party in good stead, for he had no sooner taken the dull yellow lumps into his hand than he pronounced them to be veritable nuggets of pure gold; and after extracting from the fair finders as accurate a description as they could give him of the locality in which the discovery had ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... the life and soul of every party of commercial travellers that gathered there. Conviviality took strange forms at Haworth. It had a Masonic Lodge of the Three Graces, with John Brown, the grave-digger, for Worshipful Master. Branwell was at one and the same time secretary to the Three Graces and to the Haworth Temperance Society. When he was not entertaining bagmen, he was either at Bradford painting bad portraits, or at Haworth pouring out verses, ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... Then it is that the poet or painter shows his art, when in the selection of these comic adjuncts he chooses such circumstances as shall relieve, contrast with, or fall into, without forming a violent opposition to his principal object. Who sees not that the Grave-digger in Hamlet, the Fool in Lear, have a kind of correspondency to, and fall in with, the subjects which they seem to interrupt: while the comic stuff in Venice Preserved, and the doggerel nonsense of the Cook and his poisoning associates in the Rollo of Beaumont and Fletcher, are ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... the measles set in. A wise physician once said to me: "I observe that every one wishes to go to heaven, but I observe that most people are willing to take a great deal of very disagreeable medicine first." The lives that one least envies—as of the Digger Indian or the outcast boy in the city—are yet sweet to the living. "They have only a pleasure like that of the brutes," we say with scorn. But what a racy and substantial pleasure is that! The flashing speed of the ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... that inculcated that imperishable essence of the soul to which I have neither scalpel nor probe, than be the founder of the subtlest school, or the framer of the loftiest verse, that robbed my fellow-men of their faith in a spirit that eludes the dissecting-knife,—in a being that escapes the grave-digger. Burn your book! Accept This Book instead; ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that Mr. HENRY WHITE, a grave-digger of Hellingly, has just dug his thousandth grave. Congratulations to our contemporary upon being the first to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various
... with all it offers has proved a dead failure with the aboriginal races of this country,—on the whole, I say, a dead failure,—they talk as if they knew from their own will all about that of a Digger Indian! We are more apt to go by observation of the facts in the case. We are constantly seeing weakness where you see depravity. I don't say we're right; I only tell what you must often find to be the fact, right or wrong, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... because the father did not love his child, but because he and all his friends had been taught to believe, and were firm in the conviction, that, taken away so young, it was transferred immediately to a better world. The father sprinkled a handful of dirt over its face; the grave-digger took his shovel; in a few moments the little grave was filled up, and, preceded by the boys playing on their violins, ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... originals. I then turned over in my mind the various characters I had met with in life; amongst these a few only seemed fitted for any story, and those rather as accessories; such as a politician who hated popularity, a sentimental grave-digger, and a metaphysical rope-dancer; but for a hero, the grand nucleus of my fable, I was sorely at a loss. This, however, did not discourage me. I knew he might be found in the world, if I would only take the trouble to look for him. For this purpose I jumped into the ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... of Animals compared.—Let us now compare the intellectual wants of the savage, and the actual amount of intellect he exhibits, with those of the higher animals. Such races as the Andaman Islanders, the Australians, and the Tasmanians, the Digger Indians of North America, or the natives of Fuegia, pass their lives so as to require the exercise of few faculties not possessed in an equal degree by many animals. In the mode of capture of game or fish, they by no means surpass the ingenuity or forethought of the jaguar, who drops saliva ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... when natural conditions become favorable enough; famines recurrently sweep many from the earth. Again, they degenerate when they are forced to live a life that it is possible to live but only in a miserable way. Some of the lowest tribes of men, like the South African Bushmen, or the Digger Indians, have been forced by stronger tribes to withdraw into the desert and to exist upon a lower plane of life. The physique of such peoples betrays the hardships which they have suffered. Men also flee from an unfavorable environment, thus escaping death or degeneracy, if the way into a more ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... they undergo, as traffic progresses, many improvements. Ballast is laid down. Iron or steel bridges are substituted for timber. The gorges spanned by trestles are, one by one, filled up, by the use of the steam digger to fill, and the ballast plough to push out, the stuff from the flat bottomed wagons on each side and through the interstices of, the trestles. Sometimes the timber is left in; sometimes it is drawn out and used elsewhere. This trestle bridge ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... dyspeptic with his little pair of silver scales on the table, weighing out two ounces of meat, or one ounce of bread, and looking like a death's-head at a feast, and talking like a grave-digger with Yorick's skull for a theme, that I do ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell
... re-adjusting his spectacles; "here's news. An old acquaintance has turned up." Then turning to Critchel, he touched that odd old gentleman on the elbow, saying: "You remember the old grave-digger of ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... minister's man and grave-digger, was going a sweethearting. He took off slowly the leathern "breeks" of his craft, sloughing them as an adder casts his skin. They collapsed upon the floor with a hideous suggestion of distorted human limbs, as Saunders went about his ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... the bedlam: "We appeal to you because ... you have been the party heretofore to extend the suffrage. It was the Democratic party that fought most valiantly for the removal of the 'property qualification' from all white men and thereby placed the poorest ditch digger on a political level with the proudest millionaire.... And now you have an opportunity to confer a similar boon on the women of the country and thus ... perpetuate your political power for decades ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... difficulties face the trench digger: Sand, clay, water and bullets. In order to overcome them he must be familiar with the general arrangement of a trench, the principles which govern its construction and the standard trench as it has been worked out in the present war at the cost of ...
— Military Instructors Manual • James P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker
... the whole property,—of which not a shilling belongs to him; and he has not lost it because it was not his own, but has simply gambled it away among the Jews. What can happen to a man in such a condition better than to turn up as a hunter among the Rocky Mountains or as a gold-digger in Australia? In this last adventure he seems to have plunged horribly, and to have lost over three thousand pounds. You wouldn't have ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... the roll, and just at that moment the old grave-digger came up with his little yellow velvet vest and his gray cotton cap. He looked behind the ranks where I was talking with Zebede, who turned round and saw him and grew quite pale, they looked at each other for an instant, then I took his gun and the old man embraced his son. ...
— Waterloo - A sequel to The Conscript of 1813 • Emile Erckmann
... jewels and silks. He is no longer the recluse of the lonely cliffs, chatting with the animals and gazing at the stars. He is a man of the world, with schemes of conquest filling his brain and a love of dominion ruling his heart. He is no longer a ditch-digger and a ploughman, but the proud master of councils or the cultured professor of the university. He still swears to the three vows of celibacy, poverty and obedience, but they do not mean the same thing to him that they did to the more ignorant, less cultured, ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... only through the extension of the already changed stolons or rhizomes. It means that only the parent, which is presumably not immortal, is aberrant. The offspring is no different from the weed householders have been cursing ever since the Mission Fathers enslaved the Digger Indians." ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... their arts, which casual observers have sometimes denied the Indians; yet, to note a single example, the so-called "Digger" Indians, who have been characterized as in most respects the lowest type of all our tribes, are makers of delicately woven baskets, embellished with symbolic designs and so beautiful in form as to be works of art ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... his edicts were realities, the axe, the stake were realities, and the heroism with which men took each other by the hand and walked into the flames, or with which women sang a song of triumph while the grave-digger was shovelling the earth upon their living ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... pure gold-dust, the miners readily realizing two or three thousand dollars per diem. As the grass is torn up, flecks of bright gold are found clinging to the roots, and the clay as it is turned over glitters with the precious dust. Again, the digger has to search for his treasure deep in the bowels of the earth, or among flinty rocks, or far down beneath a river's bed, and, it may be, spend weeks or months without realizing a bawbee. Nothing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 87, March, 1875 • Various
... Who could tell him how long it would take Grunty Pig to uproot the old apple tree? Although Jolly Robin thought and thought, he could think of no one whom he might ask. To be sure, there was Tommy Fox, who was known to be an able digger. But Jolly Robin didn't trust him. Tommy Fox was tricky. And there was Billy Woodchuck, who came from a famous family of burrowers. But everybody knew that old dog Spot had chased him into his hole that very afternoon, and was watching Billy's ...
— The Tale of Grunty Pig - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... from behind a tree on the edge of the Green Forest, or Bobby Coon looking from a safe hiding place in the top of that same tree. He didn't see Jimmy Skunk or Unc' Billy Possum or Happy Jack Squirrel or Digger the Badger. He didn't see one of them, but they saw him. They saw every shovelful of sand that he threw, and their hearts went pit-a-pat as they watched, for each one felt sure that something dreadful was going to happen to ...
— The Adventures of Reddy Fox • Thornton W. Burgess
... many went to the funeral, and the board which had been put up to mark his grave, until the town could afford a suitable monument, had blown over. A "freighter" had repaired his brake block with a portion of the marker, so no one except the grave digger was sure where the ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... describe them; above all, I know nothing of her hunting-tactics. But her dwelling is familiar to me: it is a burrow, which I have seen her begin, complete and close according to the customary method of the Digger-wasps. ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... setting off for the field, with your trusty mate marching step by step beside you, pick and shovel on your shoulders, and both resolved to make your fortunes in the twinkling of an eye. When you get there, there's the digger crowd, composed of every nationality. There's the warden and his staff, the police officers, the shanty keepers, the blacks, ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... Talleyrand nose for ferreting out successful men. He had to bear with him but for a few moments, however. They met a crowd of workmen at the corner, one of whom, an old man freshly washed, with honest eyes looking out of horn spectacles, waited for them by a fire-plug. It was Polston, the coal-digger,—an acquaintance, a far-off kinsman ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... must remain to lead thy people. Longing, but patient, I will await thee in Hades. Thou wilt often come to the spot in which they will bury me, to throw a plume from thy helmet, a ring from thy coat of mail upon the grassy mound. And the old grave-digger will say: 'He was here to-night; she is ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... sailor boy, to San Francisco, and finally arrived at the diggings where his uncle was engaged in mining. In those early days of California mine digging the miners were generally a very rough class of men. So it happened that soon after Ned's arrival a great gruff "digger" offered to treat Ned to a drink of liquor, and became very angry because ...
— Fun And Frolic • Various
... sometimes stranger than fiction. Where in the whole cycle of romance shall we find anything more wild, grotesque, and sad, than the easily-authenticated history of Benedict Mol, the treasure-digger ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... on: he repeated the operation until he thought that he had buried the same corpse six times. But after the sixth, the last humpback, had been buried, the married humpback came home from his work. When the grave-digger saw this other humpback, he immediately seized and killed him, thinking he was the same man he had buried so ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... in a winking 'twas some great navigator that I see a standing there,' said Haymoss. 'But whe'r 'twere a sort of nabob, or a diment- digger, or a lion-hunter, I couldn't so much as guess till I heerd ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... can propitiate the Deity through them. In illustration of their ideas, it may be mentioned that, when we were among the tribes west of Semalembue, several of the people came forward and introduced themselves—one as a hunter of elephants, another as a hunter of hippopotami, a third as a digger of pitfalls—apparently wishing me to give them medicine for success in their avocations, as well as to cure the diseases of those to whom I was administering the drugs. I thought they attributed supernatural power to ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... in this pleasing hope of the future he saw much to redeem what he regretted of the past. Still, however, the wild flare of the pine-torch over the lone grave of his adversary, and the horrid answer of the grave-digger, that he was but "finishing his work," would recur to his memory and awake ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... respects, people were generally civilised and humane, compared to gold-diggers I had met on the other side of the globe. My luck, however, was much the same. All I could do was to keep body and soul together, till at last I had to come to the conclusion that I was not cut out for a gold-digger. On my way up to the diggings, I had rested at a station owned by an old gentleman, who seemed to take an interest in me. At all events, as I was going away, he promised to receive me when I got tired of gold-digging, if I would come ...
— The Gilpins and their Fortunes - A Story of Early Days in Australia • William H. G. Kingston
... his primer sets out alone And speeds as if he were hunted, The wind goes by with a hollow moan— There's a noise in the hedge-row stunted. 'Tis the turf-digger's ghost, near-by he dwells, And for drink his master's turf he sells. "Whoo! whoo!" comes a sound like a stray cow's groan; The poor boy's courage ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... alterations. It was the most imprudent thing I ever did in all my life; but I had sworn I would not leave the stage till I had rescued that noble play from all the rubbish of the fifth act. I have brought it forth without the grave-digger's trick and the fencing match. The alterations were received with general approbation beyond my most warm expectations.' Garrick Corres., ii. 126. See ante, ii. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... enough indeed. Ben Weatherstaff went his way forgetting rheumatics. Dickon took his spade and dug the hole deeper and wider than a new digger with thin white hands could make it. Mary slipped out to run and bring back a watering-can. When Dickon had deepened the hole Colin went on turning the soft earth over and over. He looked up at the sky, flushed and glowing with the strangely new ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of 1856, the outlook of the present writer, known somewhere as Samuel Absalom, became exceedingly troubled, and indeed scarcely respectable. As gold-digger in California, Fortune had looked upon him unkindly, and he was grown to be one of the indifferent, ragged children of the earth. Those who came behind him might read as they ran, stamped on canvas once white, "Stockton Mills. Self-Rising Flour!"—the well-known label in California, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... retarded not only by the dominance of the religious purpose of the school, but by the poor quality of teachers found everywhere in the schools. The evolution of the elementary-school teacher of to-day out of the church sexton, bell- ringer, or grave-digger, [14] or out of the artisan, cripple, or old dame who added school teaching to other employment in order to live, forms one of the interesting as well as one of the yet-to-be-written chapters in the history of the ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... Orrin S——- and I. The burial-ground (there are two in the town) is on the sides and summit of a round hill, which is planted with cypress and other trees, among which the white marble gravestones show pleasantly. The grave was dug on the steep slope of a hill; and the grave-digger was waiting there, and two or three other shirt-sleeved ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... labouring-man. Of these were the landpoor peer, with his sense of responsibility cultivated by daily life and duty in his county, on the one hand; the professional man of all professions, the little merchant, the sailor, the clerk and artisan, the digger and delver, on the other; and, in between, those people in the shires who had not yet come to be material and gross, who had old-fashioned ideas of the duty of the citizen and the Christian. In the day of darkness ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... broken by something shrilling in his brain, sending little chills racing up and down his spine. Digger! A small, oddly canine-like creature with telepathic powers, a space-dweller which men found when first they came to the asteroids. The relationship between spacehounds and men was much the same as between man and dog in the old, earthbound days. ...
— The Beast of Space • F.E. Hardart
... some is supposed to mean only "digged," and it doubtless often had this meaning,[211:1] though the word is now obsolete, and only survives with us in "pioneer," which, in Shakespeare's time, meant "digger" only, and not as now, "one who goes before to prepare the ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... Doman, who had once been of some service to him, and love of whisky, which certainly had not. He had been among the first in the rush to Hurdy-Gurdy, but had not prospered, and had sunk by degrees to the position of grave digger. This was not a vocation, but Barney in a desultory way turned his trembling hand to it whenever some local misunderstanding at the card table and his own partial recovery from a prolonged debauch occurred ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... establishment of mining industries would mean a great increase of expense to the Government. It was equally clear that, as the law had been declared over and over again in the colony, unauthorized digging on Crown land constituted a trespass, for which the digger was legally responsible. But the Governor was wise enough to see that no threats of prosecution would deter men bent on digging in unoccupied lands, even if it were possible to preserve the lands of private owners from forcible intrusion. The "squatting" question had demonstrated that, beyond ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... of existing economic conditions, however, I am willing to undertake these intricate and responsible duties for a seven day week at less wages than are given the street-digger, ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... was something quite out of the common; for, crawling up, along the gangway which runs between the poophouse and the bulwarks, I came with great difficulty to the stern; and there I saw the two best men in the larboard watch (let us immortalize them, they were Deaf Bob, and Harry the digger), lashed to the wheel, and the Skipper himself, steadfast and anxious, alongside of them, lashed to a cleat on the afterpart of the deck-house. So thinks I, if these men are made fast, this is no place for me to be loose in, and crawled down to my old place in ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
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